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November 28 - December 4, 2008 The Independent Weekly 26 www.independentweekly.com.au thirst Are these the good old days? H orsham, drought, late afternoon. The sky is spec- tacular with thunderclouds: thousands of tonnes of water, stubbornly refusing to fall. Well-dressed farmers sit at footpath tables, glancing up while drinking coffee. There’s not much else to do. For hundreds of kilometres, every farmgate has a tractor or two for sale; a harvester; a favourite ute. There is no stock other than the odd scrawny sheep gnawing atwhat was supposed to be wheat, and a few bony cattle. The roads need repairing and every village building needs paint. All those Wimmera streams that run north into the Murray are bone dry. I ask for more chilli on my chook burrito. The disbelieving lass produces a bowl of slightly mustard-coloured powder which rips the nose apart. Monosodium glutamate sprayed with mace. It takes two beers to erase. “Where’s the butcher?” I ask, dreaming of edible food. “Where’s the fruit and veg?” “Coles,” she answers. Shops which once housed the butchers and greengrocers are now full of bric-a-brac: home- made artworks, trinkets and useless Caucasian artefacts that householders have chosen to live without. On the hilltop west of St Arnaud, a quick thunderstorm has left one puddle. I report this to the nearest publican. “Fair dinkum,” she says. “You shoulda took a photograph of it. We coulda used it on a postcard!” Further east, the Goulburn looks almost hearty. And so it should, if Melbourne’s new pipeline is to deliver. Across the Hume Highway, the countryside turns lush green. We wind up the King Valley to Edi – this is where the tobacco farmers were, but it is now spread with shooting vineyards, ash trees and oaks. We get out of the car at King River Estate. “Jeez, mate, this country’s looking good,” I say to winemaker Trevor Knaggs.“We get forty inches,” he says. The purpose of this journey is the annual La Dolce Vita lunch, which showcases Trevor’s beautiful King River Estate wines with a repast cooked bythe great TonyBilson. Tonymakes the annual pilgrimage from Bilson’s, at the Radisson in Sydney, to King River,where he cooks for 120 people in an old cowshed. Trevor talks to him before choosing the wines to match the meal. “We’re proud of them,” he says. “We’re going biodynamic.” A sexy tenor sax tootles away as the first diners arrive; waiters don shirts that say “Conserve water. Drink wine”. The first dish is from ancient Rome: almond gazpacho beneath a thin layer of oil. It comes with a croüton smothered in foie gras. Trevor’s ’06 verdelho matches it perfectly, with its faint hints of kernel supporting, rather than contrasting, the meal. The duet is ravishing. “Now this lobster tail will come out with fresh-shelled oysters and seawater jelly,” says Tony. The fumé, fennel and cream cheese of the ’08 sauvignon blanc suits the oysters and salty jelly perfectly, once again sup- portive rather than contrasting, just as the carambola and drying tannins of the’08 vermentino wrap that hearty lobster. Tony has roasted local venison and serves it in a sauce poivrade with chocolate, foie gras and juniper berries, with Chef Tony Bilson serves up a desert of chocolate mousse with walnut cream and red berry salad asparagus and a purée of potato and celeriac. The mighty King River Reserves – an ’06 cabernet sauvignon and ’05 merlot – nail it. In their different ways, both wines are chocolaty to some extent, and while the maturing chicory greens of the cabernet suit the celeriac side of the dish and the asparagus, the mossy, earthy, merlot nearly brings that Bambi back to life. The Milawa Cheese Company presents a cheeseboard that just a decade back could be found only in Burgundy or Champagne. So we serve two unusual reds: a sweet ’06 merlot, the result of a stuck ferment and some inspired tidying up, and the dry, unfortified (but tawny) ’99 Nancy’s Shiraz, named after Trevor’s deceased mum. “We gotta have this,” Trevor says. “Mum’d love this.” Tony’s mousse of chocolate with walnut cream, red berry salad and balsamic vinegar is a dryish, very adult affair, so we throwthe dry ’05 barbera at it. You oughta hear ’em slurp. This is one of the most utterly beautiful meals. Coming home along the river, we first traverse hundreds of open channels gushing with water. They’re about the same width as the roads, and the new government grants have been used to rubber-line them, but not enclose them. Every fifty metres, there’s a neat little steel cable mariner’s ladder so critters can climb out if they slip on the rubber. But there’s only a glum puddle of a river at Echuca. From there to Swan Hill, the anabranches are all dry, and there are millions of dead trees. There are no birds left on the road to Ouyen, and at Pinnaroo they’re irrigating potatoes with overhead sprinklers. Philip White http://drinkster.blogspot.com/ Marchand & Burch Great Southern WA Chardonnay 2007 $65 3.5% alcohol Screw cap 94++ Fanfare: Presenting the salacious white twin to M&B’s stunning pinot, from the tres ancien Porongurup, an abrupt granitic extrusion in the flats north of Albany. The fruit has a ricotta/pear/ peach/sabayon range of fruits and fatty acids, spiced perfectly by some royal French oak and a whiff of that granite, freshly chipped. The syrupy texture is perfectly balanced with the oak spice and considerable acid; the finish hearty and audacious and reluctant. Mighty white for the red nut: big fruit; big oak; big passion; big future. It makes bulk commercial Barossa/McLaren Vale/ Larncrk/Riverland chardonnay look like something that was under your bin liner. marchandburchwines.com.au Raw Power Adelaide Plains Shiraz 2006 $14 14.9% alcohol screw cap 93+ The label talks about some old punk screamer named Rawley Power, but this wine’s a sheila, mate – and a lived-in one at that.Rawley fell in love with the Bearded Lady, took the old Buick and vamoosed years ago when the circus come through, leaving this lass in the shack. Sweet and homely, like, but sweetly mysterious. All those old, woody, plum-jam tweaks, a goat stew simmering on the Kookaburra. Remnants of pipe tobacco. Big ol’ puncheons. It shows that screw-caps can protect ageing wine as well as they keep baby ones juicy and fresh. Blame Tim Freeland and Domenic Torzi. oldplains@twpo.com.au ??????????????????????????????????????????????? ???????????????? ?????? BACCHUSWINE BAR HENLEY BELLA RESTAURANT KANGAROO ISLAND COMFORT INN MARION DUTHY THAI MALVERN E-SHAN GOUGER ST ESTIA HENLEY NAMASTE PARKSIDE SCAMPIES ON THE BEACH GLENELG SCENIC HOTEL NORTON SUMMIT ??????????????? ??????????? ALFRESCO ADELAIDE CITY CAFÉ SYMPHONY TORRENS PARK COOPERS ALEHOUSE ADELAIDE CITY GRIMALDIS TOORAK GARDENS HOTEL ELLIOTT PORT ELLIOTT LARGS PIER LARGS BAY SILK & SPICE TORRENSVILLE ROBIN HOOD HOTEL NORWOOD ZEST GLENELG ??????????????? ???????????????? BATH HOTEL NORWOOD BOTANIC GARDEN RESTAURANT GRANGE HOTEL GRANGE HYDE PARK HOTEL HYDE PARK INDOCHINA UNLEY INDOCHINA MAWSON LAKES QUEENS HEAD HOTEL NORTH ADELAIDE MADAMWU’S NORWOOD STAR OF SIAM GOUGER ST ZAKS WEST LAKES “...a deliciously drinkable savoury dry white.” -2007 Cape Jaffa Semillon Sauvignon Blanc, Gourmet Traveller WINE, Feb/Mar 2008 TRADE INQUIRIES JONATHAN TOLLEY WINE MERCHANTS P—08 8352 1222 E—jtolley@jonathantolleywine.com.au